Chinese hackers charged with cyber attack on Wall Street law firms

28 December 2016

On Sunday last week one of the three criminals charged with cyber attack on US law firms was arrested in the investigation into the hack committed within the two years to date. The Chinese unscrupulous traders earned as much as over 4 million US dollars on the information stolen from the compromised servers of the blue-chip legal services agencies.

According to an indictment from the US attorney’s office for Manhattan, within the period from April 2014 to late 2015 the criminals purchased shares of at least 5 companies prior to the announcement about their upcoming deals, an information misappropriated by them in the course of their hack on the servers of the law firms representing those companies.

The traders gained access to the email correspondence between the top law firms (supposedly Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP and Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP) and their client companies. For this purposes they installed malware in the firms network of computers and downloaded millions of documents to gain access to the confidential information about mergers and acquisitions planned for publicly traded companies.

In March it was reported that investigation had been launched into the hacks of the aforementioned three law firms representing Wall Street banks and Fortune 500 companies. Among the stolen information was the acquisition of Altera Corp. by Intel Corp.

Prosecutors identified the traders as Iat Hong at the age of 26, Bo Zheng, 30, and Hung Chin, 50. On Sunday they arrested Hong and are seeking to have him extradited to the US from Hong Kong, while no information is available about the location of the other two criminals.